Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE™ Technology Study Guide

2.6. Using Session and Entity Beans

Enterprise applications require flexible components in the business logic. Components must provide stateless services, provide conversational state, and support the sharing of enterprise data. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) provides two basic types of beans to support the different components required in an enterprise application: session and entity. Entity beans provide for the persistence and sharing of enterprise data in a J2EE application. This is not to say that a session bean could not persist an object, but the entity bean specializes in persisting objects. Session beans provide the business logic and workflow associated with the J2EE application, which corresponds to the stateless services and conversational ...